Purging Our Lists

Thanks Dave.

My Someday/Maybe has c300 items on it.

It’s a challenge to review it each week as by the time I get to that stage of my weekly review I’m stating to get tired.

I’ve started to do my review of the Someday/Maybe list the following day (Friday rather than Thursday) so I’m looking at it when I have more energy.

If I don’t then I tend to skim over it and part of me feels that I might have missed something that could have been moved to a next action list or removed entirely.

I don’t recall where I heard it (probably on GTD Connect) but someone said if you remove something from Someday Maybe that you “shouldn’t have”, it will get come back into your consciousness at some point anyway.
 
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My Someday/Maybe has c300 items on it.

It’s a challenge to review it each week as by the time I get to that stage of my weekly review I’m stating to get tired.
So only review S/M when you can realistically change what you are working on now. I gave up reviewing S/M weekly years ago...I can't change that fast. So I review it quarterly. Maye try once a month for a while?
 
I seem to recall David Allen saying that the line between Someday/Maybe and reference can feel blurry. A significant fraction of my S/M’s are things I might want/need to have as an option under the right future conditions. Items which are “Next time in Seattle” may be relatively easy to recognize, collect and organize, but not everything is. I think I do ok by asking the “where and when do I want to see this?” question.

One trick I use sometimes is to use a question mark in an item to trigger consideration: “Clean attic?” I think this works best with a digital list manager that accommodates start dates and recurring items, but you can do it with a paper tickler system. Sometimes I put the trigger in explicitly “Clean porch roof when enough leaves accumulate?” The question mark is not really grammatical because I’ve written the action in the imperative, but it’s just a trigger.
 
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